Snowies and Blues

     Where there is no accumulation, laced and soft, come flocks 
     of snowies to shrub pine, wetlands and dock. 

     Is it a wish to speak a season’s complete possibility or make 
     familiar an inclination to leave? Snowy egrets could be milk or paint 
     egrets, trillium or salt egrets. But they descend softly, 

     long necks and wing fans. Each one a blizzard 
     in a nickname. Is it their lurking extinction, their long, 

     millennial disintegration that turns blue whales to blues 
     on biologist tongues? When they call it tracking blues–passing 
     sonar over the hemispheres one by one and ticking off 
     fewer mammals than a population can trust, do they know 

     they’re speaking double? Whose blues permeate this air, 
     whose mammal memory haunts farthest?


     Amy Holman  (Click for bio.)


      


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